Against imperialism

Global dominance has been the centerpiece of US policy in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union when the US suddenly found itself without a counter to its global imperialist aspirations.

This drive for dominance has always been fueled by one objective – to position US capitalist interests to more effectively plunder the labor and resources of the peoples and nations of the global South. In other words, it is and has always been both an imperialist and racial project.

Therefore, while the priority of the call by the Black is Back Coalition to “Turn imperialist wars into wars against imperialism ” is directed to the colonized and exploited Africans in the US and globally, the silence and open support for US imperialism by both parties and many segments of the liberal and radical sectors makes that call a historical demand to Western radicals.

It is Western imperialism, led by the US that is responsible for the billions of human beings living in poverty, it is imperialism that degrades and destroys the earth, that makes water a commodity, food a luxury, education an impossibility and healthcare a distant dream. It is the rapacious greed and absolute disregard for human life by imperialism that drives the arms trade, turns human incarceration into a profitable enterprise and transforms millions into migrants and refugees because of war and economic plunder.

Parasitic imperialist domination would be impossible without its core instrument of enforcement and control – state violence. Beginning with the European invasion of the Americas in 1492 to this very moment, previously unimaginable brutality and systematic violence was used to enslave, commit genocide, steal lands, despoil cultures and assault the earth all in the service of what became the Pan-European colonial/capitalist white supremacist patriarchal project.

That is why the notion that Trump represents some aberration is so insulting. That perspective and position reveals more about its adherents than the reality of Trump. Because for the colonized who first encountered Western civilization at the end of a bayonet, or in the hold of a slave ship, Trump is no departure from King Leopold, the pedophile and rapist Thomas Jefferson, Cecil Rhodes, or Abraham Lincoln who while he was fighting the South was still hanging natives as part of the ongoing US colonial expansion. Trump is just an embarrassment for liberals because, unlike the slick criminality of Obama, Trump is cruder with his white supremacy.

Western radicals are suffering from a similar kind of Trump and neoliberal derangement. Instead of fighting side by side with the oppressed peoples and nations who are still attempting, imperfectly, to extricate themselves from the clutches of imperialism, the imperial left subjects these attempts to a litmus test informed by their idealistic imaginings of how national liberation should look, even under Trump.

Excerpted from: 'History Demands: Turn Imperialist Wars into Wars Against Imperialism'.

Counterpunch.org